This evening: documented Yahoo! Pipes UI in case of sudden shutdown, built first mockup of web dataflow UI using jsplumbtoolkit.com — really excellent library, exactly the right balance between functionality and framework. It gives you a lot but doesn’t dictate how to use it.

@julien51 indeed I did! This is one of the things I dislike about RSS/ATOM (and am trying to solve with #microformats2) — they make URLs too hard to understand, forcing them to be relegated to a “advanced developers only” area :/

Playing with Yahoo Pipes for the first time. This is the UI I’ve been dreaming of for years. The data sources are bogged down with nasty RSS/ATOM semantics, but that’s mostly irrelevant. The important things:

Live, context-sensitive debugging. Want to know what the data looks like at a particular point in the graph? Click there. What if I change this parameter? It updates. WHY ARE PEOPLE NOT RAVING ABOUT THIS? THIS IS HUGE!

All parameters are programmable, but with the ability to specify defaults

Everything is declarative — not only textually, but visually.

One-click publish and deploy, with facilities to create basic UI and pre-fill it

Ability to clone and reuse pipes — each pipe is a module you can use in other pipes. Take someone elses pipe and view source, change it, reuse it.

I made a Pipe to convert #microformats2 h-feed/h-entry markup into RSS from scratch in about 15 mins, having never used the tool before (bear in mind also that this is not a tool built for consuming mf2 data structures): Convert Microformats to RSS. The tiny feedback loop the Pipes tool provides, both in deploying, sharing and debugging, enabled Tantek Çelik to find a bug in his site’s markup.

Again: WHY DOES NO-ONE KNOW ABOUT THIS? If it’s because processing stodgy, outdated, DRY-violating formats is its bread and butter, fair enough. Let’s rebuild this with microformats2.

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Aaron Parecki:
Here are some photos from today's @playmapattack game at #realtimeconf! http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronpk/sets/72157636700537984/

Aaron Parecki looks like it was a success :) Feedback after using the map creation UI: the path tool is amazing for quickly filling up maps, it would be great if it had the option to automatically insert staggered higher-point points, maybe a 20 every 5 and a 30 every 15 or 20. 50s are most fun to place by hand.

Chrome users: I added installation instructions for #weave, as Google demands payment for submission to the Web App Store and makes it difficult for you to the run software you want to run. Fortunately they’re fine with you dragging+dropping the extension in. Hopefully that makes things easier!